Receptors in the human eye are only capable of detecting light having wavelengths from 400 nm to 700 nm. These receptors are called cones and are of three different types, including one for red light, one for green light and one for blue light. If a single wavelength of light is observed, the relative responses of these three receptors allow us to discern what we call the color of the light. This phenomenon is extremely useful because it enables generating a range of colors by simply adding together various proportions of light from just three different wavelengths. The process, known as additive color matching, is utilized in color television systems. A resulting image to be displayed is broken down into an array of picture elements or pixels to be displayed.
Generally, each pixel displays a proportion of red, green or blue depending on the signals driven to the display. The representation of an image in red, blue and green is commonly referred to as RBG. However, transmitting or storing these RBG color components requires significant bandwidth. Accordingly, luminance and color difference coding is often used to reduce the bandwidth of an image to be displayed. For example, the YUV format contains a Y portion representing a luminance component (also known as Luma) associated with brightness, and U and V portions representing chrominance components (also known as Chroma 1 and Chroma 2) associated with color. In addition to reducing bandwidth, the YUV format models human perception of color more closely than the standard RBG format. While video data may be transmitted in various formats having different components, receiving video data may pose problems and require circuits which consume area of the integrated circuit.